· history
Castcraft OPTI fonts: the Chicago clone library
The OPTI fonts were a library of roughly 900 PostScript typefaces sold in the early 1990s by Castcraft Software Inc. of Chicago, a Kreiter family type business that had already lived three lives: metal type, phototype film, and dry-transfer lettering. Nearly all of the OPTI faces are other designers’ work, digitized in part from film copies Castcraft had made decades earlier, renamed, and sold cheaply in bulk. The company faded with the death of its last president in 2005, and the library survives as orphaned files. This post takes apart one surviving disc, file by file, the way we did ClickArt Fonts 2. The disc is one of the surviving libraries surveyed in our guide to the era’s font CDs.
Where did Castcraft come from?
Chicago, and type. Luc Devroye’s index traces the family business to 1936 as Type Founders of Chicago; Fonts In Use dates the Castcraft founding to 1946, by David L. Kreiter and his brothers Harry and Abe. Both agree on the trajectory: a substantial metal-type house (it acquired Pittsburgh’s Neon in 1959 and ran it as a type division), trading later as Type Films of Chicago for its phototype business, with a dry-transfer lettering line (Transfertech) on the side. The last known address is Skokie, Illinois, and the last president was Herbert “Manny” Kreiter, who died in 2005, the year the business appears to end. In between, the middle generation of the firm, the film years, is where the trouble and the library both come from.
Why do people call the OPTI fonts pirated?
Because of what the film library was. The account most often cited is Mark Simonson’s, preserved on Devroye’s Castcraft page: in the 1960s and 70s, headline setting ran on the Typositor, a film-font machine, and Castcraft, in this account, duplicated Typositor film fonts it obtained from franchisees of VGC, Filmotype, and Alphabet Innovations, contact-printed them, renamed them, and sold them to type houses. Alphabet Innovations, suspicious, allegedly planted deliberate errors in individual fonts sent to franchisees to trace the leak. A Typography.Guru poster who visited the Chicago building around 1980 remembers the wall of pigeon-holes holding Typositor film spools, and fonts from the pirated masters with characters upside down or backwards.
We repeat that as an attributed industry account, not a court finding; no judgment against Castcraft is in the record we could find. What is not in dispute is the shape of the digital library itself. When Fredric J. Kreiter filed the OptiFont trademark in 1990 and Castcraft began selling the designs as PostScript fonts, the faces were, in the TypeDrawers assessment of Florian Hardwig, virtually all based on designs by others, made and distributed without authorization or compensation, mostly from Castcraft’s own phototype copies, and renamed, which dodged the trademark problem neatly, since a typeface design itself is not copyrightable in the US (see our copyright explainer). The renaming is why an OPTI font is a small research project: the design is famous, the name is not.
What did the library look like as a product?
Bulk, cheap, and ambitious on paper. Devroye records a CD-ROM Type Library Volume 1 at $200 and the entire collection offered at $1,000. The documented sets are a 400-font OptiFont CD Series Vol. 1 (“The Designer’s Font Source”) and four Opti Designer Collection volumes of 80 fonts each. Castcraft’s printed catalogs, The Encyclopedia of PostScript Typefaces, promised far more: the company said it would produce the 15,000 typefaces of Type Films of Chicago, and its website at one point claimed licensing of 20,000 faces and of the entire “Solotype Alphabets” collection, a claim for which we found no independent evidence. Devroye’s own list holds 802 OPTI fonts dated 1990 to 1994, and he believes at least a thousand were made; the volunteer OPTI Fonts Archive, maintained by the same community that built the Solopedia index of Solo’s catalog, counted 946 by 2014.
Inside the files, an OPTI font announces itself: PostScript names like OPTIStymie-BoldCondensed, a “1.2” software stamp ahead of a plain copyright line (“1.2, Copyright Copr. Castcraft Software, Inc. 1990-1991”, one batch misspelling the company “Software. Inc.”), UniqueIDs in the 5014xxx range, and DOS filenames built on a loose house code, OPTI plus initials plus digits: OPTIBC06 is Stymie Bold Condensed, OPTIAG38 Agency Gothic. Nobody documented what the digits encode.
The disc on our bench
The archive under examination holds 786 files in 117 family folders: 170 font programs. The core is 125 complete Windows Type 1 kits, each font as the five-file set described in our archaic formats post: PFB, AFM, and PFM for all 125, PFA and INF for 112. Alongside them sit 45 OpenType editions (36 OTF, 9 TTF) in the same family folders, Castcraft’s own later conversions, with copyright strings running 1990 to 1993. By count this is not the 400-font CD or any single 80-font Designer Collection; it reads as a mixed or partial set, and we document it as exactly that.
Then we did the thing the formats post only promised: we converted all 125 Type 1 fonts to working OpenType, using the AFDKO toolchain for the outlines and rebuilding the name, metrics, and encoding tables from each font’s own AFM. All 125 converted cleanly, and the results support the one compliment even Castcraft’s critics pay it. Glyph counts run 108 to 219, averaging 187: full period character sets, punctuation included, where some modern cuts of the same designs ship less. Quality of drawing is a separate argument (one 2010 examination counted 78 bezier points on a glyph that needed under a dozen), but completeness is in the files, and it is real.
The fonts on this disc
117 families, with the face names as the files give them (the OPTI prefix stripped) and the formats present on the disc. The original designs behind most of these names are other foundries’ work, as discussed above; the equivalence detective work lives at the OPTI Fonts Archive and in Philippedada’s equivalence list linked there.
| Family | Faces on this disc | Formats |
|---|---|---|
| Action Brush | Action-Brush | Type 1 |
| Agency Gothic | Agency-Gothic | Type 1 |
| Aggie Solid | Aggie-Solid | Type 1 |
| Ajax | Ajax | Type 1 |
| Alto Greeting Script | AltoGreeting-Script | Type 1 |
| Alyssa | AlyssaOpti; AlyssaOpti-Bold; AlyssaOpti-Italic | Type 1 + OpenType |
| Amadeus | Amadeus-Open; Amadeus-Solid | Type 1 + OpenType |
| American Caslon | AmericanCaslon-ItSwash | OpenType |
| American Text | AmericanTextOpti | OpenType |
| Announcement | Announcement-Roman | Type 1 |
| Asian | Asian | Type 1 |
| Aurora | Aurora-BoldCondensed; AuroraCondensed; AuroraGroteskNine | Type 1 |
| Balloon | Balloon-Bold; Balloon-Light; BalloonExtraBold | Type 1 + OpenType |
| Bank Gothic | BankGothic-Light; BankGothic-Medium | Type 1 |
| Bank Script | Bank-Script | Type 1 |
| Bass Script | BassScriptOpti | OpenType |
| Benjie Modern | BenjieModern | Type 1 |
| Benson Oldstyle | BensonOldStyleOpti-Medium; BensonOldstyle-MedIta | OpenType |
| Berling Agency | Berling-Agency; Berling-ItalicAgency | Type 1 |
| Bernhard Bold Cursive | Bernhard-BoldCursive | Type 1 |
| Beth Light | Beth-Light | Type 1 |
| Beth Medium Agency | Beth-MediumAgency | Type 1 |
| Bevis Bold | Bevis-Bold | Type 1 |
| Binder Style Light | BinderStyle-Light | Type 1 |
| Binner Gothic | BinnerGothic | Type 1 |
| Blizzard Casual | Blizzard-Casual | Type 1 |
| Bodoni Open | Bodoni-Open | Type 1 |
| Brandenburg | Brandenburg | Type 1 |
| Calculator | Calculator | Type 1 |
| Camp | CampOpti-Caps | Type 1 |
| Campanile | Campanile | Type 1 |
| Candid Ballpoint | Candid-Ballpoint | OpenType |
| Carling Light | Carling-Light | Type 1 |
| Carmella Hand Script | Carmella-HandScript | Type 1 |
| Carolina Brush | Carolina-Brush | Type 1 |
| Cather | Cather; Cather-Italic | Type 1 |
| Champion Script | Champion-Script | Type 1 |
| Cinema Solid | Cinema-Solid | Type 1 |
| Cits | Cits | OpenType |
| Civet | Civet-Light; Civet-LiteCondensed; Civet-MediumCond | Type 1 |
| Cooke Sans | CookeSans; CookeSans-BoldItalic; CookeSans-Italic | Type 1 + OpenType |
| Cooper Five | CooperFiveOpti-Black | OpenType |
| Copperplate | Copperplate; Copperplate-Heavy; Copperplate-Light | Type 1 + OpenType |
| Corvinus Skyline | Corvinus-Skyline | Type 1 |
| Coyonet Bold | CoyonetBold | Type 1 |
| Cuento | Cuento | Type 1 |
| Delphin | Delphin-One; Delphin-Two | Type 1 |
| Design Medium | Design-Medium | Type 1 |
| Dianna Script | DiannaScript-LightAgen | Type 1 |
| Dom Diagonal | Dom-Diagonal | Type 1 |
| Dracula | Dracula | Type 1 |
| Empire Pro | EmpirePro | Type 1 |
| Engravers Old English | EngraversOldEnglish | Type 1 |
| Excelsior Script | ExcelsiorScript | Type 1 |
| Favrile | Favrile-Bold; Favrile-Light; Favrile-Medium; Favrile-Regular; FavrileBold-Italic; FavrileLight-Italic; FavrileMedium-Italic; FavrileRegular-Italic | OpenType |
| Flemish Script | Flemish-Script | OpenType |
| French Script | French-Script | Type 1 |
| Furst | Furst; Furst-Bold | Type 1 |
| Gibby X | Gibby-XBoldXCondHeads | Type 1 + OpenType |
| Holly Script | Holly-Script | Type 1 |
| Ingram Five | IngramFive | Type 1 |
| Iting | ItingOpti-Bold; ItingOpti-BoldCondensed; ItingOpti-Regular; ItingOpti-RegularCondensed | Type 1 + OpenType |
| Jake | Jake; Jake-Antique; Jake-AntiqueBlack; Jake-Black | Type 1 + OpenType |
| Kartoon | Kartoon; Kartoon-Bold | Type 1 |
| Koloss | Koloss | Type 1 |
| Leon Text | LeonTextC | Type 1 |
| Liberty Foundry | LibertyFoundry | Type 1 |
| Looking Glass | LookingGlassOpti | Type 1 |
| Lucius Ad | LuciusAd-Bold; LuciusAd-Light | Type 1 + OpenType |
| Lydian Cursive | Lydian-Cursive | Type 1 |
| Margueritte | Margueritte | Type 1 |
| Modern Blackletter | Modern-Blackletter | Type 1 |
| Morgan Twenty Nine | Morgan-TwentyNine | Type 1 |
| Neuland Black | Neuland-Black | Type 1 |
| New Bill C | NewBillC | Type 1 |
| Newport Land | Newport-Land | OpenType |
| Nissan | NissanOpti; NissanOpti-Italic | Type 1 |
| Nubian Foundry | NubianFoundry | Type 1 |
| Old English Five | OldEnglishFiveOpti | OpenType |
| Old Fashioned Script | OldFashioned-Script | Type 1 |
| Ondine Five | OndineFive | Type 1 |
| Opus | Opus | Type 1 |
| Original Script | Original-Script | Type 1 |
| Pashey | Pashey | Type 1 |
| Peking | Peking | Type 1 |
| Pippen Five | PippenFive | OpenType |
| Piranesi Italic | Piranesi-Italic | Type 1 |
| Pirogi Roman | Pirogi-Roman | Type 1 |
| Players | Players-Plain | Type 1 |
| Poster Bodoni Compressed | PosterBodoni-Compr | Type 1 |
| Protea | Protea | Type 1 |
| Radiant | Radiant-BoldXCond; RadiantBold-Condensed | Type 1 |
| Raleigh Gothic | Raleigh-Gothic | Type 1 |
| Remy | Remy-Bold; Remy-Medium | Type 1 + OpenType |
| Respighi Opti Script | RespighiOpti-Script | Type 1 |
| Roman C Shaded | RomanC-Shaded | Type 1 |
| Romana Estrecha | Romana-Estrecha | Type 1 |
| Sapir | Sapir | Type 1 |
| Schneidler Swash | Schneidler-Swash | Type 1 |
| Script Bold | Script-Bold | Type 1 |
| Sesame | Sesame | Type 1 |
| Sicilia Bold | Sicilia-Bold | OpenType |
| Smoke | Smoke | Type 1 |
| Stencil Display | StencilDisplayOpti | Type 1 |
| Stymie | Stymie-BoldCondensed; Stymie-MediumCond | Type 1 |
| Typewriter Special | Typewriter-Special | Type 1 |
| Typo C Upright | TypoC-Upright | Type 1 |
| Typo Roman | TypoRoman | Type 1 |
| Van Dyke Outline | VanDyke-Outline | Type 1 |
| Vanilla | Vanilla; Vanilla-Bold | Type 1 + OpenType |
| Vatican | Vatican | Type 1 |
| Venetian Script | Venetian-Script | Type 1 |
| Wycombe Five | WycombeFive | Type 1 |
| Yale Script | Yale-Script; Yale-ScriptSuppl | Type 1 |
| York Script | York-Script | Type 1 |
| Zepplin Script | Zepplin-Script | OpenType |
| Zither | Zither | Type 1 |
Where are they now?
Orphaned, in the practical sense. No current authorized seller of the Castcraft library surfaced in our research, on MyFonts, Fonts.com, or elsewhere, and the company itself has been gone for two decades. The fonts circulate the way Usenet taught them to: the OPTI Fonts Archive exists to rehouse copies shared in alt.binaries.fonts, and one of its faces, Spliny, appears in the Solotype catalog story as the Opti name for Novarese’s Stop. Orphaned is not the same as free, though, and these are not public domain: they are commercial works whose owner cannot be found, © Castcraft Software 1990 to 1993, which is why our conversions stay in the research archive rather than a download folder. What we can publish is the documentation, and the disc deserved it: whatever Castcraft’s ethics, its library is one of the largest single digitizations of the phototype era ever sold, and for some obscure faces it remains the only digital version there is. The archive’s complete name index, all 944 OPTI fonts with their original designs where the archive records them, is preserved in the OPTI font index.